Postmodernity and christianity

[Mr. Tea]

I recently heard a talk by a religious philosopher whose theory was that religion can't be denied because with all the evil in the world, if we are able to maintain any kind of optimism - that is, to not go and hide under a rock - it must be because of some innate sense of higher purpose that has been placed there by, you guessed it, God.

Trust a "religious philosopher" to miss something a biologist (or anyone with the merest sprinkling of a scientific worldview) would have spotted straight away: people who hide under rocks don't tend to get laid very much. A certain level of optimism must be hard-wired into us (or most of us, anyway) from a purely survival-and-reproduction point of view.

 

[nomadthethird]

A certain level of optimism must be hard-wired into us (or most of us, anyway) from a purely survival-and-reproduction point of view.

Don't you mean intelligently designed into us?

Never forget that you are "fearfully and wonderfully made"--to fester and rot in some hell hole of competing bacteria and killing machines.

 

[poetix]

For nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal;
The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear’d by the shrike,
And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey.

We are puppets, Man in his pride, and Beauty fair in her flower;
Do we move ourselves, or are moved by an unseen hand at a game
That pushes us off from the board, and others ever succeed?
Ah yet, we cannot be kind to each other here for an hour;
We whisper, and hint, and chuckle, and grin at a brother’s shame;
However we brave it out, we men are a little breed.

(from Maud, by Tennyson)

 

[poetix]

(who, incidentally, coined the phrase "nature red in tooth and claw")

 

[zhao]

our inherent connection and bond with a spiritual realm inextricable from everyday life was lost around 10 - 20,000 years ago, with the rise of the shamen, and from there our craving for that connection has been more and more effectively and efficiently exploited for power and control, convolution upon miserable convolution, deceit upon deceit, until today's bottomless confusion and utter disarray. and we

fester and rot in some hell hole of competing bacteria and killing machines,

unable to even remember life before slavery, save for a very few true practitioners within maggot infested religious traditions who still carry with them, through the ravages of history, a shadow of that bond; and a very few transcendent moments in our "art", which are all but pathetic attempts to capture a sliver of that ecstatic original grace which filled us and surrounded us.

 

[swears]

Yeah, I mean before capitalism, humans could fly and had pyschic powers and shit. Then some cigar-chomping, top-hat wearing bastards took this beautiful, pure, childlike, innocent way of life away and enslaved our minds forever. I mean, there's no actually evidence for any of this, but ideas like "evidence" and "reason" really get in the way of saying any old bollocks you decided to believe in on a whim because it made you feel better or seemed pretty cool at the time.

 

[zhao]

Yeah, I mean before capitalism, humans could fly and had pyschic powers and shit. Then some cigar-chomping, top-hat wearing bastards took this beautiful, pure, childlike, innocent way of life away and enslaved our minds forever. I mean, there's no actually evidence for any of this, but ideas like "evidence" and "reason" really get in the way of saying any old bollocks you decided to believe in on a whim because it made you feel better or seemed pretty cool at the time.

swears, you misquote, flippantly distort, and ridicule. your kind of ignorance is banal and common place.

and as is to be expected of the ignorant, the way you engage with different points of view is "you are full of shit", instead of trying to move the conversation into a mutually beneficial and interesting place.

 

[swears]

Every time I've tried to do that, you've made some smug-arsed post about how you just know there is a special spiritual plane of existence and ideas like truth and evidence are for brainwashed squares. So what's the point?

 

[zhao]

and i suspect many on here will jump in to attack my version of the story of human spirituality.

not interested in engaging with you at all as i don't have the time for 20 page discussions at the moment, like i did in the past.

i've said what i have to say, albeit in a tiny nut shell, think what you want.

 

[zhao]

Every time I've tried to do that, you've made some smug-arsed post about how you just know there is a special spiritual plane of existence and ideas like truth and evidence are for brainwashed squares. So what's the point?

that's bullshit.

there is no point what so ever in talking to adamantly closed minds who are decidedly antagonistic from the get go.

so i am not going to exchanging another word with you on this topic after this post.

 

[nomadthethird]

Zhao's post-Edenic "fallen" worldview here is a sort of new age reappropriation of a whole bunch of religious beliefs. You could call it religion stew.

It's fine if he believes this of course--and I suppose I can see the appeal of drawing together the common threads of religions from all sorts of times, cultures and geographic regions over dogmatically following just one-- but as of yet there's no evidence for the fact that the world was once a spiritual utopia that was lost approx 10,000 years ago (although that fits in with the Gilgamesh/Eden/Atlantis myth pretty well), and much more for the fact that life was actually pretty difficult back then just like it is now.

On both extremes of the political spectrum, there seems to be a tendency to point back to a utopian past that we've lost touch with, that we desperately need to find our way back to. With conservatives, this usually takes the form of "the family", rigid gender roles, the superiority/authority of men and the natural "submission" of women to their betters, rigid top-down hierarchical structures of political power, and maintaining "pure" "racial" bloodlines. With leftists, this takes the form of a belief in a primordial past where humans existed in a deeper harmony with nature, a time before "technology" ruined our beautiful harmonic connection with the natural order, an innocent natural state where people all got along and there was no such thing as misogyny, misandry, jealousy, murder, rape, incest, when the earth was still "pure" and everyone simply danced around the maypole smoking empathogens and loving one another.

Neither of these utopian pasts existed, of course, at least not exactly as these groups wish they did.

If someone put a gun to my head and said I had to choose, I'd prefer the leftist view to the conservative. But both views, at their radical extremes, if you examine them closely, are similarly limited by an obsession with regaining a lost (and false) "authenticity", a version of "pre-mediated" nature that never existed, an idea of "natural order" that has nothing to do with biology, and ultimately, a pathological preoccupation with hygiene and purity.

 

[nomadthethird]

That was Frank Zappa's big lobbying point: tax the churches & the businesses owned by the churches.

In the American new athiest community, people sign correspondences with "Tax Religion," instead of "Sincerely yours,"...

If those stripmall astrologers have to pay taxes, the rest of the sky-readers should. It's only fair.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Any ideology that emphasise the primacy of 'purity' - be it spiritual, racial, physiological, sexual or class purity - should be treated with extreme suspicion, if not outright hostility. To be human is to be impure. Who was it who said "We are born between piss and shit"? One of the classical philosophers, anyway. As nomad likes to point out, the basic biological processes that power our bodies are more or less the same as those that power bacteria. Even the Bible recognises this: "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" - from mud we arose, and into mud we return.

On a related note, one of my housemates planted some Asiatic lilies in our garden that came up a month or so ago. They managed to flower despite a concerted attack by some little red bugs that are apparently called lily beetles, and eat nothing but lilies. So the plants were soon covered in these maggot-like larvae, which all had a mysterious brown coating. I looked them up online and found that the larvae of this species cover themselves in their own faeces in an attempt to put off predators - however, it's a complete evolutionary fail as it merely acts as a scent signal to various specious of parasitic wasps, which home in on the larvae and lay their eggs in them. Parasitism by wasps accounts for fatality rates of up to 90% among lily beetle larvae.
I mention this because it quite neatly sums up nature in three words: shit, parasites and death. So much for pre-lapsarian nirvana...

 

[nomadthethird]

On a related note, one of my housemates planted some Asiatic lilies in our garden that came up a month or so ago. They managed to flower despite a concerted attack by some little red bugs that are apparently called lily beetles, and eat nothing but lilies. So the plants were soon covered in these maggot-like larvae, which all had a mysterious brown coating. I looked them up online and found that the larvae of this species cover themselves in their own faeces in an attempt to put off predators - however, it's a complete evolutionary fail as it merely acts as a scent signal to various specious of parasitic wasps, which home in on the larvae and lay their eggs in them. Parasitism by wasps accounts for fatality rates of up to 90% among lily beetle larvae.
I mention this because it quite neatly sums up nature in three words: shit, parasites and death. So much for pre-lapsarian nirvana...

Also a perfect example of a maladaptive evolutionary trait, which evolution-deniers will often demand as proof that evolution is real.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

shit, parasites and death...

...is the greatest grindcore band name ever (well, except F**k God In the Face, that's pretty good as well). it's also the title of the best existentialist novel that no chain-smoking angst-ridden Frenchman ever wrote.

 

[zhao]

Zhao's post-Edenic "fallen" worldview here is a sort of new age reappropriation of a whole bunch of religious beliefs. You could call it religion stew.

as of yet there's no evidence for the fact that the world was once a spiritual utopia that was lost approx 10,000 years ago, and much more for the fact that life was actually pretty difficult back then just like it is now.

a version of "pre-mediated" nature that never existed, an idea of "natural order" that has nothing to do with biology

well, nevermind that the version of the story i endorse fits the accounts of every ancient culture on earth, but let us see what science tells us, from Jarred Diamond, Professor of Geography and Physiology at UCLA:

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image... Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it’s hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. ...

Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well.

with the advent of agriculture an elite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.

Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it.

Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture’s glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us?

complete article here

this is only one paper from one scientist... there are lots of other studies which have reached the same conclusions.

 

[CHAOTROPIC]

So much for pre-lapsarian nirvana...

You mean, before Nevermind?

 

[Mr. Tea]

You mean, before Nevermind?

Arf, very good!

 

[zhao]

some who have been around might wince at me posting the same article which i've posted before. but i do this because many around here time and again refuse to consider or even acknowledge these scientific findings, presumably because this information contradicts their own calcified notions.

and these people repeatedly hurl insults and mockery in my direction (see Swears previous page), and accuse me of "believing what ever feels good, with no regard to evidence (or the lack of)".

people will not see what they don't want to see, this much we know. but i always think that there is hope...

 

[Mr. Tea]

Zhao, if agriculture is such a maladaptive cultural meme, why do nearly all cultures on Earth practise it today? Consider a hypothetical group of people, Tribe A, that have started farming in the neolithic Middle East. Imagine yourself a member of a neighbouring group, Tribe B, which still subsists on herding domesticated animals, hunting game and foraging for fruit, seeds, tubers, birds' eggs and so on. Would you look at Tribe A, with their oppressive centralised authority, hierarchical religion, ingrained sexism and days filled with back-breaking labour instead of endless leisure time, and think to yourself "Sounds great, sign me up!"?

Or is the argument that Tribe A would have invaded Tribe B's territory and either killed them off or enslaved them and gradually assimilated them? But it seems to me that the fit, strong, well-fed B-ites would have delivered a righteous arse-kicking to the malnourished, diseased, demoralised A-ites - wouldn't they?